Q. How does your work as a poet influence your fiction writing?
A. I hope the poet in me demands more from each sentence. But I also use my poems in my novels. “The Annunciation: Our Mothers in Church,” which is in my collection of poems, This Country of Mothers, was hugely influential on the religious themes in The Miss America Family.
Q. Was writing this novel different from writing your first novel, Girl Talk? What unique challenges did The Miss America Family present to you?
A. The alternating points of view was a wonderful challenge. It allowed me to have Pixie and Ezra bounce their narrations off each other. I enjoyed the layer of conflict that their individual slants added to the novel as a whole. I think it also created this rent-apart-and-pieced-together tension that I hadn’t planned.
Q. How do you think the publishing industry hurts or helps the work of many young writers today? Is there a difference between writing as a published author and working solely as an artist?
A. As an unpublished novelist, there is the pressure of creating a novel that is undeniable. It has to be so moving and so letter-perfect that an editor won’t be able to say no. As a published novelist, there is the pressure that people will actually read this, that it will be in every bookstore, that it will be reviewed in national publications, that people will walk up to you to discuss it, and that finally, therefore, it has to be undeniable. In the end, there’s little difference.
Q. Tell us a little bit about your next novel, The Madam.
A. The Madam is based on the life of my grandmother, who was raised in a house of prostitution in the ’20s and ’30s in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her mother was the madam of the house. For a number of reasons, I decided to change the location to a town based on Morgantown, West Virginia, where they would survive under the constant rain of ash. This novel is an enormous departure for me. The Madam is achingly personal, historical, sweeping, nearly epic in tone. Writing it was wrenching and possibly one of the greatest pleasures of my life.
Julianna Baggott is the critically acclaimed, nationally bestselling author of eighteen books, written under her own name as well as the pen names Bridget Asher and N.E. Bode. Most notably, she’s the author of The Pure Trilogy, an Editor’s Choice in The New York Times Book Review. With approximately seventy-five foreign editions of her novels published overseas to date, Baggott has had work appear in The New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, and on NPR’s All Things Considered and Talk of the Nation.
Books by Julianna Baggott
Pure
Fuse
Burn
Which Brings Me To You: A Novel in Confessions (with Steve Almond)
The Madam
The Miss America Family
Girl Talk
As Bridget Asher
The Bloomed Life of Harriet Winslow
The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted
The Pretend Wife
My Husband’s Sweethearts
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Washington Square Press Publication
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Copyright © 2002 by Julianna Baggott
Originally published in hardcover in 2002 by Pocket Books
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Washington Square Press, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
ISBN: 0-7434-2297-X
ISBN: 978-0-7434-2673-2 (eBook)
First Washington Square Press trade paperback printing February 2003
WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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